On Knuckleheaded Apologies, Russia & Iran, and Border Politics: Duncan Hunter 5/17/10, Part I

This interview is part of an ongoing series of conversations with former Congressman and conservative activist Duncan Hunter. The intent is to keep this rock ribbed conservative’s ideas and in the public square which will hopefully help guide his former colleagues still in office, as well as inspire the American people to embrace his Reaganesque views on American politics. With any luck, Hunter will seek the presidency again in 2012, but for now he is concentrating on helping the GOP regain the majority in the House by supporting a lineup of like-minded, young conservatives running for seats currently held by liberal Democrats. This interview finds Hunter on at his home in San Diego County.

AJM: Hello Congressman, how are you doing tonight? Get all the groceries put away?

AJM: Great, great. Let me start off again with Russia, since we did not get to your answer earlier. Russia has announced they are selling sophisticated S-300 anti-aircraft weapons to Iran. They also announced the other day that they are going to build Syria’s first nuclear reactor – for ‘energy purposes’, of course. All this over weak protests from the United States. Why do you think they are suddenly flaunting their muscle?

DH: Sure. To address the Iran problem, it appears that the weapons complex that is developing in Iran; and that is principally the centrifuge cascades that are established in Nantanz and several other locations, are proceeding ahead robustly with the refinement or enrichment of uranium. When they reach a 90% level, that substance is capable of being used in a nuclear device. As they mature that program, it’s obvious that they expect the United States, potentially, to take pre-emptive action.

DH: So it appears what they are doing right now is developing air defenses that will make it difficult – or at least we’d pay a heavy price for penetrating the corridor that we’ll need to penetrate in order to make a successful, complete annihilation or destruction of their systems. So what they are essentially doing is working on a program with the Russians to stand up defenses around their nuke systems. Just as other countries have put up SAM missile defenses to prevent American air penetration.

DH: Russia likes money. And the Iranians have money, and they have oil. Russia has proceeded apace, as you know, with supporting the Iranian program. And they and China have also blunted our attempts to put any meaningful sanctions in place.

There’s an old saying that “nations don’t have friends, they have interests”. And we have few true friends in the world; Great Britain being one of them. But while Russia has been somewhat neutralized since the end of the Cold War, their interests, in many cases, are still opposed to the United States. So I think what you are seeing here, in the attempt to establish air defenses around the Iranian weapons complexes, is being done in anticipation by the Iranians and Russians that there may be a pre-emptive strike by the United States and other allies.

AJM: Do you think this, and the fact that Russia is also supporting Syria’s nuclear supposed power ambitions and that China is obviously going down its own path, don’t you think this calls for instead of an Obama policy, a policy similar to that of Ronald Reagan?

DH: In the end, certainly. Peace through strength is the policy that won the Cold War. And the idea that the Obama administration expressed that somehow other nations in the world, including Russia and Iran, were going to be persuaded by these American – essentially gratuitous reductions in weapons that have been agreed to with the Russians, the idea that they were going to follow suit and they were going to were going to end up - at least the implication was that they would end up - curtailing their weapons programs if we would simply be a ‘good example’, shows a real ignorance of human nature and the history of nation-states.

And I think that also shows the fallacy of the main theme in these large weapons reductions that have been proposed by Obama and Russia – the agreements that have tentatively been made by the US and Russia – and that is the fallacy that there aren’t more nations in the world now who have a piece of the action then simply the vestiges of the Soviet Union and the United States. The Chinese have a small but an effective nuclear weapons system. They are using Long March missiles as the lift systems and they are developing and fielding now a mobile nuclear system, which I believe is called the DF-31. And they have an industrial base that is capable of turning out a large number of missiles in a short period of time. They make about a hundred medium range ballistic missiles a year. They are not signatories to any of these reductions that we’ve agree to with the Russians. Neither is Iran a signatory, nor is North Korea. So the idea that the Obama administration has visions that somehow we are going to elicit a response from countries like Iran - that they will cease their programs or stop their march towards having nuclear weapons, I think is extremely naïve.

AJM: Absolutely it is naïve. I think it is extremely naïve to think Vladimir Putin is going to sign a piece of paper saying “yeah, yeah, yeah, we’ll reduce our weapons”, but then not carry out what he perceives to be Russia’s foreign policy objectives over our limp-wristed protestations.

DH: Yeah. As I’ve said, I think the Russians have interests. But they are not necessarily our friends. They like hard cash and Iran supplies them with hard cash. That’s also been a place for a lot of their people who work in their weapons complexes. Iran is place for them to make money. They have a large number of Russian engineers who found employment in Iran’s weapons complex.

And it’s difficult to understand whether there is a long range Russian strategy here. But the Russians obviously know that we are dependent, to a large degree, on Middle East oil. And the more complicated our situation is in the middle east, the more difficult it is for us to respond to other foreign policy crises around the world. I think the Russians look at the Middle East as a bog for the United States in a foreign policy sense. And their goal is to make that bog much more menacing by moving defensive systems, SAM defensive systems, into Iran. And the current administration seems incapable or unwilling to recognize that reality.

AJM: Yeah. On another foreign policy front, I don’t know if you heard, but Secretary of State Clinton’s top deputy, Posner – I don’t know his first name – was talking with China. And afterwards he was interviewed by the Associated Press. The talks were ostensibly about the human rights conditions in China – you know we always go through this motion of criticizing them for human rights violations – but this clown actually sounded more apologetic about American human rights ‘violations’, including Guantanamo and racism and all this other fluff! And Posner actually had the nerve yesterday to apologize to China, apologize to the chicoms, for Arizona’s new immigration law. I could not believe it. It is burning up the blogosphere as we speak!

DH: The liberal imbalance is absolutely amazing. It’s stunning. I mean when Zarqawi, who was Osama Bin Laden’s lieutenant in Iraq - who was ultimately killed in an airstrike, an American F-16 airstrike in Northern Iraq - but while he was on international television cutting the head off of an American – CUTTING HIS HEAD OFF – ‘because’ a handful of soldiers in Abu Ghraib had put women’s underwear on the head of some of the prisoners. And they had done some other despicable acts, yet nonetheless harmless acts that did not result in any injuries. That self-flagellation that we went through, the leftists putting those pictures on the front page of magazines and beating ourselves publicly in the world media, ultimately resulted in guys like Zarqawi killing Americans in a horrendous ways, that was in their statements, retaliation, for those acts.

So the idea that Arizona simply said ‘we will make the federal law – that is its illegal to be here illegally in the country, to come across the border without permission – because we agree with that’. And the idea that that now it’s something that liberals apologize for, especially to a communist regime, is just remarkable. Remarkably knuckleheaded.

AJM: Congressman, has it changed over the years? Have they become more “remarkable”, or are the liberals the same jaw-dropping foolish panderers that they are today going back 25 to 30 years ago?

DH: We’ve all heard foreign policy speeches by diplomats at the State Department and other places in foreign venues who go for the cheap applause line damning their own nation, the United States of America. It’s part of their DNA. They are drawn to making critical statements about our country like a moth to a flame.

You know what’s interesting? My folks were one time, Jim, in the Philippines. They were at the embassy and there was a long line of people waiting to get into the embassy to get visas to come to the United States. And also at that time right outside the American embassy in Manila, there was a bunch of radical leftists demonstrating against the American naval presence there at Subic Bay. And they had a bunch of well-made signs that said “Americans out of Subic Bay” and “Americans out of the Philippines”. While my folks were waiting in line to get in, they noticed that the demonstrators, the organizers of the demonstration against America, would go over to the line where people were waiting to get VISAS TO THE US, and hire them to for a few bucks to come over and hold the signs in the demonstration that said “America out of the Philippines”!!

DH: The point is that most people in the world, all these people are trying desperately to get into the United States, including hundreds of thousands of boat people who we were told by the lefties that we were the cause of all the problems in Vietnam and if we just left, the communists in North Vietnam and the peasants of South Vietnam would be one big happy family. And when we left, half the nation tried to swim after us!

DH: Yeah, exactly. An estimated 250,000 people died in these ‘re-education’ camps. They were basically concentration camps after the war. But the point is people understand that this is a good nation. And typically what the liberal leadership does is expound this notion so enthusiastically that we are a bad people and that we wish to apologize for our sins. It’s a Marxist game. Because the people who receive that information know that we are a really good people, that it’s a fiction. And it’s good for a couple of cheap applause lines from liberal elites. Even after liberals like Obama blasted the United States, you still see people form dozens of countries around the world lining up at the embassies in an attempt to get visas to come to the United States. They know this country is good country.

Incidentally, Guantanamo is a place where the terrorists there gained an average of five pounds every few months. They have a medical system that is better than most HMO systems that Americans have. And I actually published the menu one time from Guantanamo when people were yapping about the torturous activities; the lefties were talking about the so called torturous activities at Gitmo.

DH: I remember on Friday it was honey glazed chicken, rice pilaf and two kinds of vegetables! And that was an average meal. They have great food, and in the words of Miss Bordallo, who was the Democrat representative from Guam who went down there with me on one of our CODELS, when she came out an appeared before the cameras she said this, and I quote, “this place is a country club”.

DH: Yeah. Listen; there was a great line in the movie The Man Who Shot Liberty Valence. When the newspaper editor finally was told by Jimmy Stewart, the man who was supposed to have shot Liberty Valence, when he told him it was really the character played by John Wayne who actually shot Liberty Valence - played by Lee Marvin - the newspaper guy put his pen and pad away. And Jimmy Stewart said “aren’t you going to print the real story?” And the newsman said, “listen, when the legend conflicts with the facts, print the legend”.

DH: Now the legend is that this place that serves honey glazed chicken and rice pilaf and lets you play soccer, and has the US taxpayers pay for the Koran to be read 5 times a day over the loudspeaker, and where the guards that come into the cells have to put on white gloves before they touch the Koran and the prayer beads are all paid for by US taxpayers and they have a good life and have great medical care; the legend is that that is a torture house. And when the leftists have their anti-American legend, they don’t want to print the facts.

You know, the American soldiers that run that place, they probably have more visitors there – politicians and ‘rights’ organizations – than any prison in the world. Incidentally, there is only one major prison in the world that I know of where there has not been a murder. You know were that is?

DH: Guantanamo. If you look at the prison systems in the states that are represented by people like Senator Dodd, and then senator- now president Obama, you’ve had dozens of murders in their prisons. None of them has recommended closing their prisons that’ I’m aware of.

AJM: And not just murders. They got buggering going on and all sorts of crazy things.

DH: They’ve got some pretty bad stuff, yeah. The US Army runs a better prison than the guards in the state if Illinois and the state of Connecticut.

AJM: Absolutely right. Hey, I just wanted to mention also, switching gears on you, Senator Jim DeMint – you know Senator Demint?

AJM: Yeah, and as far as I’m concerned he’s about as close to a Hunter Conservative as I can find that’s still serving, other than your son. He’s in the Senate now, of course.

AJM: But he’s been, a couple of times now in the last few months, he’s been trying to attach – get this – the Secure Fence Act, the Secure Fence Amendment, he’s been trying to attach that to several pieces of legislation including the bank reform bill. He’s been trying to get that thing through. He’s been fighting for the Hunter Fence, all 854 miles of it.

DH: Jim is becoming a much better guy now that you told me he’s doing that! (laughs)

AJM: (laughing) He’s written two articles on it: One at Townhall and one in the Washington Post, I think. He talks about how important it is for the REAL border fence, the double fence with the border patrol road, but he curiously hasn’t mentioned your name yet. But he’s pushing it hard and he’s got a lot of support for it. Don’t know if it will get past Obama, but I thought you’d like to know that.

DH: That mandate was in the law. Of course you know that there are two things you have to do. You’ve got to have the authorization and you’ve got to have the appropriations. So the way the liberals stop these things in many cases is you don’t fund them.

But the border fence was finessed by the Texas Senators. I had some 300+ miles of double fence mandated for the Texas-Mexico border. Right now their border is literally on fire with the smuggling of narcotics and illegals. They ended up finessing that and only doing 60 miles of fence, but it wasn’t even the double fence.

AJM: Yeah, that’s another thing that DeMint forgot to mention in his articles; that it wasn’t the Democrats who stopped it. It was your esteemed Republican colleagues, Mr. Hunter.

DH: Yeah, but now that the Democrats have the whip in hand, they are not allowing it to go through either.

AJM: No doubt that most Democrats don’t support it. But they were afraid to knock it out during the heated amnesty debates. But I don’t think Kay Bailey, Cornyn, and Slick Perry were very afraid. (laughs)

DH: Yeah. There is no doubt that those Texans didn’t want to have a fence. And you know, the virtual fence, which I told the Bush administration would be a virtual disaster, has been just that. I think we spent over a billion dollars on that in Arizona.

That’s why they have a real fence around the Whitehouse; they know that virtual fences don’t work.

AJM: You know though, it’s really gratifying to see the Senators now, with Jim DeMint leading it, support your idea. And guess who is one of the co-sponsors of the amendment? You’re never going to believe it.

AJM: Well, he’s either seen the light or he sees JD Hayworth breathing down his neck.

AJM: Honestly, it’s so gratifying to see people move your way; pretty much the entire Republican establishment is now talking how good your border fence is. Think about all the years you’ve been pushing this against the GOP tide, sometimes alone…

DH: Well, we’ve built a lot. We’ve built the fence in San Diego. We finished the last piece in Smugglers Gulch last year.

DH: In a number of other places, while we don’t have double fence, at least we’ve erected vehicle barriers. So we have about seven hundred and some miles of something. But the great thing about the fence is that you can keep building. It’s not something where the window goes away and you can never do it. It just takes the political will to get it done. We can and should continue to build the border fence.

I’m glad McCain finally signed on. Remember in the ‘olden days’ when he had the one liner “if you show me a 12 foot fence, I’ll show you a 14 foot ladder”? Well, that was what the liberal democrat governor of Arizona used to say as well. And she had two complaints she would make in almost the same breath. One was that the fence didn’t work. And the other was that ‘doggone it, California built the fence’, so now all the smuggling traffic was in her state. So her first complaint was that it would never work, and the second complaint is that it worked too well! It was always tough to tell which complaint she or John was going to use on any given occasion. (laughs).

AJM: (laughs) Yeah. I was reading a little bit about the Yuma sector, where they actually built some of the real border fence. And the Yuma sector seems to be doing quite well compared to the Tucson sector.

DH: Yes. Listen; call Larry Nelson, former mayor of Yuma. I don’t think he’s in office anymore. But call him up, he can give you some good statistics. But as I recall, the Yuma sector built the fence, because we persuaded the Administration of the President to go along with building the fence there. You know the law that I wrote that we enacted in 06, required the double fence all the way from Calexico, California to Douglas, Arizona. That’s 392 miles. It was supposed to have been finished by May of ‘07, at the start of the hot season, May 31st of ’07. That was to keep these illegal immigrant families from being pushed out by the coyotes and dying by the hundreds in the Arizona desert. We were going to get that fence finished. But Larry Nelson, I think will tell you, that in the Yuma sector, the part that has been fenced now, had before that 138,000 arrests annually. And the new fence took that same sector down to 3,800 arrests. So it had a marked decrease as a result of that.

Also, the part of the border that is contiguous with the Federal training range there, we also fenced that; at least a big piece of it. Not with double fence, but we fenced a big piece of it. Before we simply had people driving across. So that’s had a salutatory effect. But you’ve GOT TO HAVE A FENCE!

The other thing this shows that’s interesting, is that you now have huge controversies over these things like the Arizona law. The Arizona law is a function of the frustration of state governments with the federal government’s inability to control our border. Obviosuly, if you had a double fence all along the Southern border of Arizona, and people had to knock on the front door to get into the United States and into Arizona, you wouldn’t have the states HAVING to do the things they are doing.

AJM: I agree with that. So are you gratified to see that the Republican Party has finally turned the corner on this?

DH: Well, yeah. But it is something that was actually accomplished. I want to see the fence continued. So when that ‘support’ for the fence translates into structures….you know President Bush signed the Secure fence Act in October of 2006, just before the elections. After that, as you know, he sat on his darn hands in terms of getting it finished. So there was a political component to the Whitehouse supporting that particular piece of legislation. So what we need to do is translate the political posturing and rhetoric into concrete action. And that will be manifested in the completion of the Border Fence.

The good thing about the fence is that we can keep building. I think ultimately, there will be enough pressure in Texas, New Mexico and Arizona that people will agree to build it. It doesn’t make any sense not to.

DH: Well that’s true. I talked to Perry about this, and to Kay Bailey, and to the President. My point was that a rancher in Texas whose land borders Mexico does not have the right to determine immigration policy for this country! He doesn’t have the right to say ‘I’m going to let you in from a foreign country because you are going to work on my ranch for a buck a day’ and ‘I’m not going to let you in because I’m kind of suspicious about you – you may be a criminal and may want to hurt people’. Ranchers and farmers don’t run our immigration policy, period. And they shouldn’t.

Yet some of them like the idea, for their own practical purposes, that they could control, literally, who came into the United States on their particular ranch. So they had a huge supply of cheap labor, but with that came a large exposure. The exposure was that a lot of the people coming through were carrying back packs of cocaine. And a lot of them came over to hurt Americans and commit all sorts of crimes.

AJM: Exactly. And according to the Department of Homeland Security, a lot of them are middle easterners and Chinese! Certainly not any majority but we’ve got all kinds of characters coming across.

DH: And that just shows that anybody can get to Mexico fairly easily. And ultimately, the same smuggling operations that move narcotics and Hispanics across the border can move any other people across the border just as easily. At some point in the future, you are going to see a – we hope this never happens – but I can tell you, the smuggler who gets $10,000 a night to move people with drugs across the border is not going to turn down $10,000 from a terrorist to move explosives across the border. It’s that simple.

AJM: You’re right. Money talks. So let’s make it difficult and build that Hunter Fence.

In case you missed these, they are highly recommended!

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Duncan Hunter Interview 3-5-2010: On Obama the Apostrate, The Reagan Doctrine, and Aging Hippies

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Duncan Hunter Interview 2/24/2010 – McCain v Hayworth, O’Reilly v 2A, w/cameo from Gunny Pop

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Duncan Hunter Slams the Obama Adminstration over push for Gays in the Military

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Duncan Hunter Slams Obama’s SOTU! 1-28-2010 Interview

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Duncan Hunter Interview – 1/21/2010: Mass. Miracle, Obama, Cheney, Jobs, McCain-Feingold & More!

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Duncan Hunter Interview 1-8-2010: GOP Primary Politics, JD Hayworth, Panty Bomber and FOOTBALL

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Duncan Hunter Interview - Dec. 18, 2009: On Christmas Blessings, the Gay Agenda, and Don Rumsfeld

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Duncan Hunter Interview - Dec 8, 2009: On Huckabee, the EPA, GOP Amnesty Hacks, and Harry Reid!!

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Duncan Hunter Interview 12-01-2009: Obama’s Weak Speech, SEALS, ClimateGate, and Shrinking Uncle Sam

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Duncan Hunter Interview 11-17-09: Terrorist Trials in NY, Amnesty, Sarah Palin and More!

http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-bloggers/2391044/posts

Duncan Hunter Interview 11-10-09: Gunny Pop, Afghanistan, Terrorism & Political Correctness!!

http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-bloggers/2384405/posts

Duncan Hunter – Nov. 4, 2009: On the 2009 Elections, Global Warming Alarmists, and Ronald Reagan!

http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-bloggers/2378862/posts

Duncan Hunter – October 27, 2009: On ObamaCare, RomneyCare and Americans!

http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-bloggers/2372627/posts

Duncan Hunter 10/9/09 Interview. Bomb Iran, confront China, and work to defeat Socialism!

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